A Catalog of Investing Errors

Love Lists

We're attracted to lists like moths to flames and netheads to clickbait. The Big List of Behavioral Biases is by some way the most popular page on this website, but it actually provides very little insight into investing successfully.

Behind this, though, lies a deeper truth. Lists are processed more easily by the brain, and they're perfectly optimized for the click and go environment that is the Internet. Here I explain why. In a list. Obviously.

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Jam Today – Tyranny Tomorrow?

Tyranny of Choice

One of the most famous experiments in social science published this century was on jam, or at least the impact of having more or less types of jam to choose from. This research, by Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper, in When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing, suggested that consumers are often paralysed by choice.

By extrapolating from what was originally a pretty limited study researchers have created a whole new industry out of reducing the number of options for people to select from. Of course, that leads to the next tricky question – which is who decides what should be available, and to whom?

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